Wartime Internment of American Citizens: Japanese Americans in World War II

In the early months of 1942, a Presidential order was issued forcing more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent into prison camps, including nearly 70,000 U.S. citizens. Not accused of any crime, these citizens and their families were imprisoned behind barbed wire, guarded by armed soldiers. Many of the internees lost their homes, their farms, their businesses and their personal property—never to be recovered.

For the past few years, College of Integrative Sciences and Arts' physics professor David Meltzer has collaborated with his friend Walter Imahara, a former internee, to collect stories from those who, like him, had been imprisoned in the camps in Arkansas, thousands of miles from their homes on the West Coast. The book, published this year by the University of Arkansas Press, recounts the personal stories of former internees of the Jerome and Rohwer relocation camps, two of the ten wartime “relocation centers.”

Drawing from the stories in the book and focusing on the Imahara family, Meltzer will discuss the incarceration events and the lasting impact they had on the families and American society.